Overwatch - That time Blizzard made a non-Diablocraft game.

[Dinosaursssssss]

This article tackles some of the social issues that ZeroFiftyOne mentioned; remains to be seen how successful this stuff will be, but Blizz is tackling the problem in an interesting way that makes me hopeful.

 

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/05/how-overwatch-tries-to-create-friendly-competition.html

 

  Quote

Team Fortress 2’s use of community-run servers allowed players to return to digital spaces that acted as centers of community, which assists in players forming friendships in-game. Because Overwatch lacks this architecture, it instead needs players to spend more time with each other. While the lobby system can’t allow nearly as many players to interact with each other at once as the server system does, and thus players can’t form social groups as large as they can in other games, it can still help them assemble a clique of friends to group with. Overwatch also encourages repeated play by having players vote on the best performance in the match; secretly, players are more likely to be matched with those they have voted for. This means that players may group with those they have specifically respected.

[melmer]

Soooooo, is future character and map, game mode DLC going to be free?

 

I heard a new character was being announced in the next few days, who i guess will be in the finished final game.

[zerofiftyone]

From what I gathered, it's a game update for everyone rather than a DLC package.

[clyde]

Interesting article. I think the increased likelihood of being paired with someone you voted for at the end of the match and the bonus for consecutive matches in the same lobby are especially clever.

[Dinosaursssssss]

Yeah, I think there's a lot of potential for those subtle social features to build a really great community. I just can't help but feel like it still won't match the feeling of having a regular server. The Team Funcom TF2 server just feels like home to me after so many years of playing there, in a way that a system like this can't really replicate...there's something about seeing someone drop by who hasn't been around for a while, or coming back after months and having friendly faces (or steam icons I guess) still kickin' around that just makes me feel cozy and comfortable in a way that matchmaking can't quite capture I don't think.

[zerofiftyone]

  On 5/20/2016 at 5:38 PM, Dinosaursssssss said:

Yeah, I think there's a lot of potential for those subtle social features to build a really great community. I just can't help but feel like it still won't match the feeling of having a regular server. The Team Funcom TF2 server just feels like home to me after so many years of playing there, in a way that a system like this can't really replicate...there's something about seeing someone drop by who hasn't been around for a while, or coming back after months and having friendly faces (or steam icons I guess) still kickin' around that just makes me feel cozy and comfortable in a way that matchmaking can't quite capture I don't think.

 

Yeah this pretty much sums up my feelings towards servers in TF2. 

[singlespace]

Well, if you want to see an insane match with a very good Genji:

 

One thing to keep in mind is their team had to make sure the point was contested for 5 straight minutes of overtime.

 

Here's another match where you see how aggro Widowmaker looks (a lot of airshots):

[clyde]

So weird to see that there are people who know what they are doing.
To any of y'all who are watching those videos  who haven't played yet, don't worry; first of all you don't have to know what is happening in order to have a good time and secondly, playing the game feels way different than watching it (the game seems to transform my clutziness into grace).

[singlespace]

The pro-teams have been running it from very early on, so there are people who have logged several hundreds hours if not considerably more already, but it's not really anything to be worried about.

 

Overwatch is brilliant regardless of your degree of skill as long as you're playing on relatively even teams and so far it seems like match making has been quite good at making sure that happens. The player base in the beta alone was rather massive, so there wasn't really any issue with finding people of similar skill to play with.

[clyde]

[singlespace]

[Dewar]

Even though I know that most of my friends group is going to be playing nothing but this for the next couple of weeks, I've managed to hold firm and not purchase it. At this point, having played none of the beta, I'd be way behind already, I never liked TF2, and my skill at shooters has really decreased in the last couple of years. 

 

Sure does look pretty though.

[singlespace]

I could never really get into TF2, but I love Overwatch. One of the brilliant things about is that there are many classes with a wide variety of play styles including several that don't require great aim or super human reflexes. One of my favourite heroes is the support Mercy where you don't need to aim much at all, but you do need to have a good awareness of what's going on all around you.

 

Characters range from needing to be pinpoint or have great tracking like with Widowmaker and Genji respectively, to characters that almost don't need to aim, like Winston (who's primary fire arcs in a radius), Reaper (who has a very wide spread), Reinhardt (who's main purpose is to shield while his attacks are all very generous in forward arcs), and the supports like Mercy, Symmetra, and to a lesser extent, Lucio. Maybe a quarter of the cast doesn't require much at all for aim and many are quite forgiving in terms of reflexes. Many of those classes also form the core of your team.

 

It's really crazy how positive the game feels: even losing several matches in a row doesn't feel bad with how they carefully craft their feedback to the player. Every round ends in a play of the game that replays a nice moment in the game when someone played well, then a screen of several notable achievements by players from both teams are shown in the form of cards. Say if there were some supports and tanks that did a lot for their team, then how much they healed and prevented damage would be highlight under their names. Everyone on both sides votes on who they think contributed the most and you end up with a lot of situations where a player on the loosing team will be the highest voted player, or there will be a single player that most people on both teams will agree did awesome. Better still, the feedback actually has a very concrete benefit, the match making system tries to match you with players you've previously voted for and those who were in matches that you liked. The end result is that the game feels much less adversarial, which is kind of weird for a competitive game.

 

Even the little details retain the same kind of feel. The kill feed is off by default and many players choose to keep it that way. Kills aren't prominently tracked or displayed, sometimes as a side note you'll see how many last hits you did, but for offense classes assists are the primary stat tracked, not kills. The final seconds of every post match summary is finished off with your own personal stats and achievements for the match such as whether you broke your own personal best or how close you were to breaking one, what your contributions to the game were organized by how your class plays (so supports will track things like how much damage you healed, or how long you kept buffs up, etc).

 

So if you're on the fence because of worries about slower reflexes and worse aim, or how competitive and hostile FPSes can be, don't worry: Overwatch has your back.

[clyde]

Yeah, what singlespace said. I don't really have an interest in convincing you to buy Overwatch, but your reasons aren't very relevant to this particular game. I don't enjoy TF2, and I expected to not enjoy Overwatch based on video of gameplay (it looks too fast and precise), but once I played ten matches or so and started to get interested in using character abilities it really hooked me. I'm not good at it, but taking pot-shots at enemy paths with Symmetra's slow-moving orb until I got enough lucky hits to install a teleporter for the team was how I first started to feel useful. Then once Winston cleared out all my mini-turrets with his cattle-prod during a later match, I got curious about trying to  use him. It just escalated like that.

There is certainly some amount of reward for fast and precise aiming, but there are numerous opportunities to have fun being helpful to your team with other characters.

[Brannigan]

Overwatch feels like the next step from tf2...in the very least it's the best shooter SINCE tf2 by a large margin for me.  Totally why I will not be getting it anytime soon or ever because I know I will pour all my time into it instead of doing important life things!  With the beta I already was just absorbed into it to a ridiculous degree.  Something about the mishmash of tf2 with Lords Management style characters just really scratches so many itches.  Totally agree on the comments about it being a really positive game.  Everything about that game is designed to feel not only friendly but very heroic regardless of what side you're fighting on.  In some of my matches that positive feedback encouraged players themselves to be very positive, often complimenting others at the end of matches regardless of team or at least people laughing together at the dumb stuff that happened.  I only ever really got that consistently from the tf2 server I used to play on.

[prettyunsmart]

It's 10 minutes past the stated launch time and the game is not yet playable. 

 

[clyde]

Seems to be up for me.

[clyde]

I wouldn't be concerned about everyone already being good at the game considering how poorly everyone (including myself) has been playing the objective in my first couple of matches.

[melmer]

Overwatch has been fun today!

So did nobody buy it?

I've got a "friend" list of around 100 people on my PlayStation and only 2 people have the game :/ must be that price point. Shot themselves in the foot with a ten day beta of the whole game maybe?

[BusbyBerkeley]

I have a feeling that most people are playing on PC, but that might just be because that's where my friends play. It's also $20 cheaper there than on consoles.

[Jutranjo]

I played the beta but I'm not buying it. There's a group of ~10 people on PC as well.

[singlespace]

  On 5/24/2016 at 9:43 PM, Mington said:

Overwatch has been fun today!

So did nobody buy it?

I've got a "friend" list of around 100 people on my PlayStation and only 2 people have the game :/ must be that price point. Shot themselves in the foot with a ten day beta of the whole game maybe?

 

I have a little under 30 people on my list who play, but that's on PC.

[eRonin]

It really is a case of buying the game on the platform that your friends are on, since it's an entirely multiplayer experience. I had between 10-15 friends on PC playing yesterday, and I knew a few more people through my local Smash Bros community who all play on PC.

[Mawd]

I think I know about 30 of my steam friend who have it now even if I don't have their b.net id's. I guess there's about 10 thumbs who talk about it in slack and probably have it now on top of that.

[thepaulhoey]

I've only played a small bit since release and I'm still enjoying it as much as the beta. The quality of team mates varies a lot, I've had a lot of people who keep going off on their own and getting slaughtered so we end up getting steam rolled as a result. It is very much a team game.

 

My Battle.net ID is paulhoey#2628 if anyone wants to add me I'll be playing whenever I have spare time over the next few weeks for sure.